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Wall Street Journal

The Day I Played Soccer with Bob Marley

There's a cruelty in marking the birthdays of iconic figures who died too young. Bob Marley would have been 80 next week, on Feb. 6. For me the strange thought of a geriatric Marley conjures up a meeting with him decades ago, when all of his idealistic intensity briefly took me as a target before we managed to find common ground, improbably, on the soccer pitch. In March 1980, I was living in New York and writing about music for the Italian daily Stampa Sera. I had hopped a plane to Negril, Jamaica, which was then the coolest Caribbean destination, and found myself listening to Marley's latest release, 'Survival,' at Rick's Cafe, a hangout for aged hippies, intellectuals, artists and adventurers. 'Survival,' released in the fall of 1979, marked Marley's return to a strong pan-African message and dominated the playlist at Rick's.